A Murder of Crows: The Sound of Ink
by bluegreenfish
Summary: Oneshot: As Inky Evenstar travels from Mongolia to meet his cousin amongst the den of wizards, he recounts the day of the last purge via wizard-kind. Warning: Graphic violence and sexual themes.


_This is an excerpt in the memory of Inky Evenstar. Memories of the purge and how he got his black eyes. WARNING: Graphic horror and sexual themes._

**The Sound of Ink**

I like ink. I like paint. I adore mess, risks in my work.

Before the last purge, I used to paint. I was a terrible painter, couldn't do much besides splash it on canvas, put a blindfold on and with a pre set colour palate on a paint board, I would paint blindly. The work wasn't amazing, I eventually came up with the same sort of stuff, and it looked the same.

I then took the canvases off the wooden frames they were stretched out onto, I cut them up and collaged them, and in that way, made something more than what I already had.

I was seventeen and I had a cousin called Daniel. We got up to very little together, Dan was always studying for some sort of ritual of passage and I was painting in a little cramped studio. The smell of the different oil paints got nauseating after a while, so Dan and I would go out to get a snack from a nearby grocers and walk around the park for a bit. Mucking around and playing pranks on some of the locals before going back inside for work. He said that I could never understand the meaning of work once, I dared him to switch places and he shut up immediately. I think he knew that I worked fairly hard.

This isn't about a collection of memoirs. Dan died, got the message by owl from a lost relative, Dan's son in fact, and I'm on my way over there. This is a recording of an incident that happened on my eighteenth birthday. It was the day I saw things in a completely different light, it was also the day before the purge.

We knew about the war, we knew all about it but stayed out of it. Grindelwald and Dumbledore had been close; this was a war of their own making respectively. It was none of our concern. Sometimes I wonder if we should have helped, then I remember that the Grey were already endangered, our numbers already significantly diminished.

Anyway, when I turned eighteen I woke up and I couldn't see anything. It was pitch black save for a few smidgens of white pinpricks of light. I turned my head only to see a large orb of white light. That was the sun, I couldn't see much else but the sun and it's reflections off certain points in the room. I called out for my parents in a panic, blindly ambling out of bed and tripped over on the covers. My sister came in to see me and she saw my eyes and screamed. I asked what was wrong but she kept screaming and screaming, to this day I didn't understand if she was afraid of me or for me. Now I'll never know.

My parents had rushed into the doorframe, saw my screaming sister and noticed me and my eyes. My mother had paled I am told, I couldn't see much of anyone save an outline of my sister in a distorted grey shape and my mother was a distant blur. My father just murmured,

"I didn't expect it so soon."

At that I immediately asked him what he meant. He helped me up, as he got closer he got brighter and clearer, still an outline though, still distorted and warped. I held onto him as we hobbled to the kitchen. He sat me down and asked if I wanted a drink. I had asked for water and a coffee to clear my head. As he set the kettle up and poured me a glass of water, my mother and sister walked in. My mother sat next to my father, and as far away from me as possible. It still hurts thinking about that.

My sister sat next to me, which tensed my mum up. I wanted to say that I was fine, but only able to see in monochrome and outlines at that, I was unsure of what had happened. Of what I looked like. Eventually my dad spoke up,

"Where to start… Well, firstly, this isn't a disease. None of us will get this and you aren't cursed or anything."

My mother visibly sighed with relief, I was sure because she didn't want to get it. Deciding to listen for now, I ignored the hurt in my chest. I listened to my dad as he continued his explanation,

"It's a sign in fact. Do you remember when you discovered you had an affinity for storm magic?"

How could I forget, waking up and hearing the hum in the air. Waking up and hearing the sound of silence, the echo of air and energy and wanting to break out of it all and fly free. It took me a while to calm down, though my attention span was permanently shortened, now I could only-

"Listen to me, when you were born we had you both tested for your magical affinities. The Legion does it to all who had former service and their children. Ari, you have affinities for Growth and Telekinetic magic. Your growth magic has not yet manifested but you already have a tendency to gesture and objects will hit people in the face. That was why you have lessons with Lt. Boglich."

Ari, my sister, nodded as my dad continued, this time talking about me.

"Inky, you on the other hand were tested and have an affinity with Storm magic, but you also have an equal affinity with Oblivion magic. Also known as death magic. It's not necromancy, you can't bring people back but you can work with death."

"These eyes you have are different. You can still see, only the shape is distorted. What you really are seeing is the person's souls. You can see them, watch them, and as your magic truly develops, you can even shape them. I will get you set up with the few Oblivion magic users we have, their control exercises should be helpful."

After that little talk, my mother had been consoling and my sister was a little jealous but I thought she had the better end of the stick. Growth magic was more practical in every day life, Oblivion magic was just really hard to hide, even more dangerous in it's applications. The other Oblivion users were really loose with everything. They were so chill, someone could stab them and it would take them years before they realised. They weren't inattentive, they just were really mellow. I was started with as many control techniques as possible, which I ended up learning with speed. They then taught me how to access the more recent techniques that had been invented and how to create new techniques. Apparently Oblivion magic had so little uses that most of the work was creating something and defining it's uses. I managed to learn how to record events with my eyes, so I could recall them in detail later on.

I fell asleep with that technique still active.

When the purge happened, I awoke just to see my father's throat slit with a cutting hex. I could hear screams in the master bedroom. Opening the door woke me to true horror.

My mother's body was strung across the room, still kept alive. Her head was across the room at the end, she was moaning. Originally I thought she was moaning in pain, but as I listened closely I realised she was in pleasure. I felt sickened and walked to her head, where her neck was stretched and slowly cutting curses were being sent across in shallow arcs. Blood seeped from the cuts slowly as if in slow stasis.

The front of her dress was opened up, her distended neck extending from here. Chokers were laced tightly at the base of her neck, all with spikes pointed inward, impaling her flesh deep. He breasts hung out loosely, the skin peeled off in strips until it reached her sex. There was a man, fucking her with wild abandon. I recognised him as my uncle. His movements were erratic and uncontrollable. Looking to the corner, I turned to see a man with blonde hair and a handsome face. He had his wand extended and was torturing my uncle into spasms. The movements were inducing rough penetration into my mother.

Her legs were extended further along, the joints sectioned from the leg in pieces. Her knees were a foot away from her upper leg, cut and nerves visible as they extended to connect the upper leg muscle to the knee. The same arrangement was in place for the lower leg. The feet were sectioned into the individual bone segments, and placed further and further away by magic. It was all coming from this one man, he was separating my mother slowly as her orgasms from rape masked her bliss or even heightened the pleasure.

How do I know this? I unwittingly recorded this with my eyes, saw it and could never forget it, the details never to be lost.

I ran from the room, the man with blonde hair was too caught up in torturing my mother and uncle to notice me. I ran out of the house and saw Dan. He was battling off two wizards and had my sister on his back. I called to him. All three combatants turned and in that moment I told Dan to duck. Concentrating my shock into willpower, as Daniel ducked I severed the heads from the two attackers. Dan quickly backed to me, transferring Ari to me.

She asked me in a distraught tone if our parents were alive. Dad was and I told her so, also saying mum was as well. Ari was better off not knowing about what really happened to mum. We fled, the three of us from the area.

We thought we were in the clear when they stopped pursuing us an hour ago. We espied a younger man with brown hair, roughly the same age as the blonde man. Ari panicked at seeing him and he saw her. He turned to see me and his eyes widened. In a look of grim determination, he shot a killing curse at Ari. She died in my arms. I sent a wave of black death in retaliation, cutting into his knee with surgical precision. He fled, his left knee a bloody mess.

After a few moments of grief, we heard shouts of our pursuers. Dan and I laid Ari against a tree, out of view of the sight of the purge and fled.

After spending a few months together, we split to go our separate ways, deciding it would be too dangerous to stay together. After Dan left, I gathered up my storm magic and turned into air. I would vanish, leaving behind a trail of clues for them to follow me and if they finally caught up with me, I would kill them.

I never forgot those two men, the blonde haired man with a dark aura who was the torturer of my mother and uncle, and the brown haired man with a light aura who killed Ari. I would bring vengeance upon those two for that day.

So mote it be.


End file.
